According to the manual, two parts of Mario Paint are meant to familiarize the user with the SNES mouse: the title screen, where users can click on each of the logo text for "surprise[s]" to occur[3] and a fly-swatting mini-game named Gnat Attack, where the player swats 100 insects before fighting a boss named King Watinga.[4] The mini-game lasts three levels, and after they are completed, the game starts over with the enemies swarming in and attacking at faster speed.[5] Content creation features of the program include a drawing board, "Animation Land," a music composition feature, and a coloring book. Collages can be saved at a time in the program to be loaded at later usage of the software[6] or recorded to VCR.[4] In the coloring book, the user can color-in and edit four pre-made black-and-white drawings, including one featuring Yoshi and Mario, another featuring various animals, a greeting card, and a underwater scene.[7]
The "drawing board" feature is where original paintings can be created. A user can choose from 15 colors and 75 patterns.[3] After choosing one of these colors or palettes, the user can draw with a pen (small, medium, or large) and airbrush; [8] fill in a closed area the selected texture with the "paint brush" tool;[9] and create perfectly-straight lines, rectangles, and circles that is the color or pattern (either fully colored-in, with just an outline, or with a spray-canned outline).[10] Parts of a drawing can be copied, pasted, and moved to other areas,[11] rotated vertically and horizontally,[12] or erased via pens of six various sizes.[13] An entire painting can also be erased via nine unique visual effects.[13] Animation Land involves the use of these tools for creating multiple frames, and allows for the creation of four, six, and/or nine-frame animations; elements of one frame can be copied to others for smooth animations to be created.[14] If a character is being animated, the animation box can be set on a background and move throughout it in a "path" recorded by using the mouse in the "path lever" feature.[15]
In the animation and drawing features, stamps can be added to each painting and frame, which 120 existing ones included in the software.[3] There is a stamp editor that, via a large tile grid,[16] allows the user to create new stamps or edit existing ones, with the same 15 colors for the drawing section usable in the stamp editor.[17] Up to 15 user-made stamps can be saved to a "personal stamp database."[18] There are also text stamps, such as English, Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji characters, that can be added and changed in size and color.[19]
The music composition tool allows users to write pieces either in common time or triple time.[20] There are 15 instruments samples to use that are notated with different icons, including eight melodic sounds (a piano represented by Mario's head, a bell sound represented by a power star, a trumpet represented by a fire flower, a Game Boy sound represented by an icon of the handheld console, a horn section sample represented by a goose, a guitar sound represented by a jet, and an organ represented by a car), three percussion sounds (a bass drum represented by a mushroom, a wooden block represented by a ship, and a bass pluck represented by a heart), and five sound effects of Yoshi's zip, a dog bark, a cat meow, a pig oink, and a baby hiccup.[21] The icons are added to a treble clef, and notes that can be added are limited to a range from the B below middle C to high G.[20] Additionally, since no flats or sharps can be added, pieces are restricted to notes of the C Major/A Minor scale.[22] Other limitations include composing only in quarter notes,[23] a maximum number of three notes on a beat,[20] and a maximum number of measures a song can last (for 4/4 songs, it's 24 bars, and for 3/4 songs, it's 32).[22] Pieces made in the composition tool can be played in the animation and coloring book modes.
